Welcome

It’s Decision Time for King County Assessor

“I was chief deputy and managed various assessment departments over the years. I survived under 5 different Assessors over 30 years … the job is a management position and most appraisers are not managers. I do not subscribe to the position that the Assessor should be an appraiser – rather the Assessor should manage the appraisers and staff”

– Loran Clark

Your Voter’s Pamphlet is on the table and your mail-in ballot is stacked with the rest of the mail. You will find five names on the ballot for King County Assessor.

Of these five, only Lloyd Hara has developed and defended agency-wide budgets — in good times or bad.

Only Lloyd Hara knows what it means to resolve competing appeals and weigh conflicting advice in the accountability fishbowl of public administration.

Only Lloyd Hara spurred one complacent agency after another to startling levels of improvement … led them through generational technology change … won national awards for his administration of agencies … and authored innovations in performance management that endure as federal Government Accountability Office standards. (See Lloyd’s bio and read his plan.)

This is decision time — time to elect a responsible public official who will manage more than 200 staff members with a $20 million budget, in a position so vital it affects everyone in King County, yet so far off the radar that nobody noticed when the last elected Assessor unfortunately disappeared into the drink.

Now the choice is yours. [See the rest of the field below.] You can cast your vote for the real estate developer who has sunk nearly $100,000 of his money into buying this office … the drummer who once toured Italy with a Christian rock combo … or Lloyd Hara, the public advocate who once opened doors to women in ten thousand service clubs all over the globe.

Like the nearly 800 people and organizations that have endorsed his campaign, you expect Lloyd Hara to make a difference, and you count on him to keep your trust. And he will work hard to deserve that trust, and to take concrete actions to improve the lives of county taxpayers.

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What about the rest of the field?

Of the remaining candidates, two are to be commended for bright ideas and public-spirited criticism of the status quo — but neither is provisioned to go the distance in a county-wide race.

Two others are campaigning on the premise that your Assessor should be a property appraiser. (No Assessor in memory has been.)

One is a “labor guy” who imprinted campaign flyers with bogus union bugs … an “environmentalist” who shuns Transit-Oriented Development … a candidate in his third bid for Assessor, whose Joe Mallahan “endorsement” left Mallahan speechless. He still recites the “Lloyd raised taxes” fabrication that we fact-checked to smithereens back in June. He has made good money in the real estate market he once appraised, and has sunk nearly $100,000 of his own money into his campaign, an astronomical amount to spend on a King County Assessor’s race (in which campaigns cost, on average, about $20,000).

The other is a stand-up guy (and stand-up comic) who stood up to Washington Mutual — more than a year after headlines began anticipating WaMu’s demise. With no experience in government, and limited depth in management, his plans rest on questionable assumptions about how the agency already does business.

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